(msn.com) With plans for an extra day docked to the space station now receiving official blessing, astronauts and ground specialists are developing plans on how best to exploit the time. New tasks on that day, and possibly on the third planned space walk, have been necessitated by the startling debris losses during the shuttle’s launch.

Read Full Story: Shuttle gap sets off station scramble - Return to Flight - MSNBC.com

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(cnsnews.com) Some conservatives see sure signs that Senate Democrats are planning to consider Judge John Roberts’ religious beliefs as part of his confirmation process. Roberts has been described as a devout Roman Catholic.

The Family Research Council points to a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed by George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, in which Turley said Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) has asked Judge John Roberts, “what he would do if the law required a ruling that his church considers immoral.”

“Unfortunately, Senator Durbin has chosen to ignore the Constitution and is seeking to impose a religious litmus test on Judge John Roberts,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

Read Full Story: Conservatives Complain of Stealth Religious Litmus Test — 07/26/2005

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(chicagotribune.com) Before an audience of schoolchildren from Aurora, Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Monday made Illinois the only state in the nation to prohibit the sale or rental of violent or sexually explicit video games to minors.

Read Full Story: Chicago Tribune | Law bars violent game sales to children

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(chicagotribune.com) For the first time since the Gallup Poll began keeping track in 1992, more Americans say their alcoholic beverage of choice is wine, not beer.

Read Full Story: Chicago Tribune | A cold one’s less cool these days, poll finds

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It was nice to see the shuttle return to flight. I got to see the launch on HDNet on a Pioneer Elite Plasma. Pretty Cool.

(msn.com) Space shuttle Discovery lifted off Tuesday, opening a new chapter in space history more than two years after the Columbia tragedy grounded NASA’s shuttle fleet.

Read Full Story: Space shuttle takes off on historic flight - Return to Flight - MSNBC.com

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Pray for these leader’s families.

(msn.com) The Boy Scouts of America vowed to continue their Jamboree despite the death of four adult Scout leaders in an electrical accident while setting up camp on the opening day.

Read Full Story: Electrical accident kills 4 Boy Scout leaders - U.S. News - MSNBC.com

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(chicagotribune.com) An agreement was reached Thursday to extend daylight-saving time in an effort to conserve energy, but not to the extent the House approved in April.

House and Senate negotiators on an energy bill agreed to begin daylight-saving time three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and extend it by one week to the first Sunday in November. The House bill would have added a month in the spring and another in the fall.

Read Full Story: Chicago Tribune | House, Senate OK Daylight-Saving Extension

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(publish.com) Newspaper and magazine publishers, besieged by rising costs, tumbling circulation and the frustration of giving their content away on Web sites, are gradually turning to downloadable electronic editions as an alternative to print.
Although the technology is in place and vendors are in the marketplace offering to convert print publications to digital facsimiles, experts agree that the evolution of electronic editions is in its early stages, and there are large obstacles to overcome.

Read Full Story: Electronic Editions Could Save Plenty … if Readers Switched

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(zdnet.com) WiMAX (World wide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a standardization process for the IEEE 802.16 Ethernet standards, much like Wi-Fi is the standardization process for the IEEE 802.11 standards. WiMAX has been one of the most prolific buzz words of wireless networking for nearly two years and it is probably one of the more hyped and misunderstood technologies in recent memory.
Some of the misunderstandings of WiMAX are:

• WiMAX is longer range than Wi-Fi
• WiMAX is faster than Wi-Fi
• WiMAX will compete with and replace Wi-Fi
• WiMAX is more secure than Wi-Fi

Read Full Story: » Getting beyond the WiMAX hype | George Ou | ZDNet.com

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(culturalcatholic.com) Catholic Judge John Roberts, 50, of the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was nominated by President George Bush to the United States Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Justice Clarence Thomas are the three of the nine Supreme Court justices who are also Catholic.

Posted in Politics, Catholicism | No Comments »

(msn.com) Broadband Internet access via TV cables can reach 100 Megabits per second as early as next year, 50 times faster than the average broadband speeds now offered to cable TV homes, a Finnish firm said on Wednesday.

Read Full Story: Super-speed broadband seen coming in 2006 - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com

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(aclj.org) John Roberts, Jr. is an exceptional choice for Associate Justice to the Supreme Court of the United States. He is well qualified to serve on the nation’s highest court.

Read Full Story: A Look at the Background on Judge John Roberts, Jr.

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(cnet.com) Internet phenomena. Memes. Grist for the e-mail forwarding mill. Whatever you call them, Web fads are entertaining, unintended consequences of life on the World Wide Web. Once the masses could put anything online easily, they turned up weird fetishes, hilarious parody, jaw-dropping narcissism, and moments of brilliance. And over the past 10 years, some of these ideas broke through to the mainstream. Whether it was dancing hamsters, a kid enjoying his day as a Jedi Knight, or the sudden ability to publish your thoughts online with just a few simple clicks, the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs.

Read Full Story: Top 10 Web fads - CNET.com

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This is an interesting article I read today. On our TEC weekend, we talked a lot about learning the meaning of suffering and being able to just “Offer it up”.

(zenit.org) Benedict XVI encouraged Catholic doctors to teach their patients the transcendent meaning of illness and suffering.

Read Full Story: Pope Urges Doctors to Teach Meaning of Suffering

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(bankrate.com) Look through your wallet. How many credit cards do you count? Have promises of better rates, perks and lower fees caused your wallet to overflow and your mailbox to be stuffed with hundreds of offers each month? While most Americans carry between five and 10 credit cards, some people carry up to 50 — which could wreak havoc on your credit score. So, how many credit cards should you have?

Read Full Story: How many credit cards should you have?

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(halbrook.net) …or at least he did when he was Cardinal Ratzinger… LifeSiteNews.com reports that back in 2003, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger expressed serious reservations about the novels , writing to an author analyzing the “Good or Bad” of Harry Potter that “It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly,”

Read Full Story: Pope Opposes Harry Potter Novels - Halbrook.net

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(chicagotribune.com)They’re everywhere — the footwear, that is. Even on members of the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team in a recent group picture with President Bush.

Read Full Story: Chicago Tribune news : Local news

Posted in Politics, Odd Stories | 1 Comment »

Wow! And I thought Google Maps was cool! What an awesome, free program! I’m seriously thinking about the paid subscripotion, so I can use my USB GPS with the software.

(google.com) Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in — Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.

Read Full Story: Google Earth - Home

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(cnet.com) Technology evolves. Good technologies and products usually survive; poor ones usually go extinct. But not all of the technologies and tech products that have swirled down the drain of the tech gene pool deserved their fate. Here are some big, and some small, ideas that we thought we’d have with us forever, but that unfortunately have gone the way of the dodo.

Read Full Story: Top 10 tech we miss - CNET.com

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(halbrook.net) The AP Reports: A federal judge has ruled the Pentagon can no longer spend millions in government money to ready a Virginia military base for a national Boy Scout event typically held every four years, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday.

Read Full Story: Judge: No gov’t money for Jambo

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Psychologist-Doctor Tells Why Divergences Run Deep

NEW YORK, JULY 9, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Boys and girls have marked physical and psychological differences and hence they have to be educated differently. This is the thesis of a book published earlier this year by psychologist and family doctor Leonard Sax.

In “Why Gender Matters” (Random House), he takes issue with the modern tendency toward gender-neutral child-rearing. According to this theory boys and girls behave differently because of the way they are educated, or because of cultural factors. Sax describes how in the mid-1990s he began to see more and more young boys arrive at his office with requests for medication, due to their supposed attention-deficit disorder.

Read the rest of this entry »

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